Good news. A new version of Viewer2 will be available in the near future. In addition to fixing the bugs that have been waiting for a fix for a year or so, it will be a significant improvement in performance (namely proper multi-threaded image loading that results in a lot smoother user interface especially when browsing over slow network connections) and also how the user interface works.

For example, there’s a new tag cloud view, a more traditional grid based thumbnail list and an improved version (or, a total rewrite) of the light table view which was the only view available until now (with more physical image groups that can contain other subgroups — in fact you can view a directory tree this way popping open the directories). Overall, it’s pretty sweet.

No estimates when it will be done, except for the infamous “when it’s done.”

7 responses to "Viewer2 Status"

Nixxx says:

Hello Tero Lindeman,
I really love your tiny little program viewer2. But… I installed it in Windows 7 Build 7137, it installed allright, the menu drops down allright, the sidemenus are doing okay. But when I try to open the ‘open files icon’ the program hangs totally. I had to kill it with the process manager. Would you be so kind and have a look at it?
Viewer2 v.4044, I love to use it under Windows 7. I never used Vista. I jumped from Win XP Pro to Win7. And I love It!!
No problems at all (exept few programs, like yours). Very stable! Love to hear from you. Kind regards, Nixxx

Hmm, I’m running Windows 7 myself and the button in question works perfectly. The only thing I can think of is that maybe the open dialog was open but for some reason was behind the main window. Maybe it will show up if you Alt+Tab out of Viewer2 and then go back again.

If the dialog is not anywhere to be found, the only thing left is to try running Viewer2 with the XP compatibility settings. I have a super experimental version of Viewer2 with some new features which I could release in hopes that fixes something. It for example doesn’t hog the whole screen – which could relate to the open dialog bug. Not too stable but still works and is the version I use daily (and btw it isn’t the version with the really fancy new features, it’s basically the same as the old version but slightly better). Let me know if the above fixes something or if you want to test the new version.

pinpin says:

I really like Viewer2 and had been enjoying it under XP for a little while now.

But I recently upgraded to Windows 7 (32bits) and things aren’t working as smoothly as they used to. While it was quite smooth & fast with my old setup, now I find Viewer2 to be slow…

Simply hovering over little thumbs to have the thumbnail to “grow” or moving it around appears really slow, and looking in the task manager it seems Viewer2 is eating all the CPU it can. (It’s only at 25% but since I have a quad core I don’t expect it to get any higher)

Any clue as to what could be the problem/how to fix it? I tried switching Compatibility to XP-SP3 and pushing the max memory limit (in configurator) to the max, alas it didn’t help. Haven’t tried the “XP Mode” because that seems to require a 500+MB download and I’d rather find another solution to ran this otherwise awesome tool!

Any idea of when “when it’s done” might be? Cause “significant improvement in performance” and multi-threading sounds really good to me right now… :)

Wow, just found out about this application, and I have to say, I’m really impressed with it so far.

The only problem I’m having is that whenever Viewer2 needs to open a new window, be it to select a folder to view, be it to confirm a new tag, this window somehow shows up in the background. The only way for me to get there is by ctrl-alt-tabbing out and change the focus of windows.

I’m running Vista 64bit and it runs in xp-compatibilitymode, but still no luck.

If this has already been resolved, I’d love to hear about a solution, because this would be a stupid reason not to use such a wonderfull program.

Astonished User says:

What i`d like to see in later Versions is the addition of Folders as Boxes, where you can send the photos in.

And i’d change the way thumbs are generated. Seems that only the name of the image is used for the thumb, which is not very good, as there are often samenamed pictures in different folders…..maybe you could add the date or the filesize, or the checksum to the thumbnailpreview?

But even without these funtions viewer2 is totally awesome. Better than ANY other Viewer i’ve tested so far.